Forgiving Others, Forgiving Ourselves

Forgiveness is one of the most holy values. And why not, it’s a value that is so hard to cultivate and to put in practice. Much has already been said about forgiving those people who have hurt us and offended us. Books have been published. Quotations on forgiveness have been circulating around the world. And self-development workshops focusing on forgiveness have already been conducted. It’s easy to say that there is already an information overload on the topic of forgiveness – but that doesn’t mean actually forgiving has become any easier because of all these. Forgiving is still difficult. It still involves pain. It still requires a denial of one’s self.

But to forgive, according to the mass homily this morning, is to liberate ourselves. To forgive is to set us free from the consuming anger and hatred that is bound to destroy us in the end. When we forgive, we actually do ourselves a favor. It is as if we proclaim, “I will not allow this person, or this incident, to disturb my inner peace – therefore I forgive.”

Aside from the difficulty to forgive others, it is also often a challenge to forgive ourselves – and many of us are not even aware that we are struggling with this dilemma. We sometimes think we are good, doing fine, no problem at all, until we are confronted with issues that force us to look deep within us and see – we have done something wrong in the past and we have not yet forgiven ourselves. The other person might have already forgiven us, but we could not forgive ourselves. Up to the present moment, we still harbor guilt, we are still ashamed of what we have done, and we still feel some degree of hatred directed towards us. This failure to forgive ourselves can be crippling. It can destroy us from within.

Forgiving ourselves might be difficult, but we have to remember that we are only human – we make mistakes from time to time. And from those mistakes, we grow. The mistakes we make are parts of the experience – we learn because of those mistakes. We should always remember that God loves us, that He will always forgive us, and so we must also learn to forgive ourselves, because we are worthy of forgiveness.